As well as making money, businesses also have social responsibilities. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Access to clean water is a basic human right. Yet some now argue that, because it is a right, every home should receive it free of charge. From my perspective, this reasoning is flawed: an unrestricted free supply would exacerbate water scarcity and environmental pollution, and would ultimately undermine the very right it seeks to protect.

If clean water 1is provided free of chargecosts nothing, households 2wouldwill gradually treat it as an entitlement rather than a scarce resource, and consumption will rise accordingly. This 3excessive consumption risks depletingoveruse may deplete reserves and trigger shortages. Cape Town's 2018 "Day Zero" crisis, for example, showed how quickly a city can run dry once residents treat supply as unlimited. 4Furthermore, such unrestricted usage places severe strain on sewage infrastructureSuch habits also feed into sewage systems, 5the overloading of whichwhose overloading can contaminate rivers and degrade the environment.

At the national level, the same logic applies. Given the uneven distribution of water resources, governments must plan and allocate supply carefully. 6Were domestic consumption to surge unchecked, industrial and agricultural users would face serious shortfalls, causing factory shutdowns, 7job losses, and higher food pricesjob losses and higher food prices across the economy.

Admittedly, proponents of free water 8argue that access to essential utilities should never be restricted by financial hardshippoint out that no family should be denied a necessity, and South Africa's Free Basic Water policy was introduced with exactly this aim. In practice, however, it has encouraged waste among 9affluent householdsbetter-off households while leaving the distribution network short of maintenance funds. We should therefore not jump to the conclusion that water must be entirely free; instead, governments can levy charges according to household income and offer subsidies to those who genuinely cannot afford their bills.

In a nutshell, low-income households should be given 10subsidized water tariffscheaper water, but this does not mean that all charges should be abolished. 11Therefore, pricing water does not constitute a denial of human rights,Pricing water, then, is not a denial of human rights but 12an essential mechanism for safeguarding themthe only way to guarantee them in the long run.